Tricks & Treats from The Learning Chambers

Halloween is just around the corner and that means it's time again for EE's Tricks and Treats. The Elementary Entourage bloggers will be sharing some of their favorite teaching tricks and tips. We will also have some terrific teaching treats just for our readers! Make sure you stop by each day for some trick or treating fun!

I am very excited to share some teaching tricks to help you implement an ozobot challenge into your classroom. I love STEM challenges that involve programming and the ozobots have definitely been a class favorite lately. Here are some tips and tricks to help you implement a challenge that uses both quadrants and coordinates.

My first trick is to make sure that you give your students time to explore. It will really help with classroom management and will also give your students time to work through challenges and learn how to use the ozobots independently.

My second trick is to align your ozobot challenge to something that your students are currently learning about. My students were learning about x and y coordinates and the four quadrants, so our ozobot challenge centered around that.

After our lesson, I gave the students a piece of grid paper and a checklist. The students had to find the point of origin and then label the x and y coordinates. As part of the challenge, they had to determine the starting part or where their ozobot would start. Then we used ozoblockly to program our ozobot to complete "tricks" inside of the grid. The challenge was to make sure that our ozobot stayed inside the grid. It was a challenge but a fun one!

Do you want to have your students complete this ozobot challenge using quadrants and coordinates? I have this freebie as a treat just for you! I included several different grid paper sizes for easy differentiation and also an easy to follow checklist. I hope this helps you implement the coordinates challenge into your classroom.